He was an advertising executive who saved lives after the 2001 terrorist attacks by selling Xerox equipment to Super Bowl viewers.
His wife said the cause was cardiopulmonary failure.
Mr. Kay won 30 Clio Awards and was in the advertising Hall of Fame for the innovative and often playful campaigns he and his team created when he was senior vice president and creative director at Needham,Harper & Steers.
He said in an interview that they have five basic guidelines for advertising. The customer should be the first one to start. You can live with the client. Don't ignore the obvious. Don't keep it complicated. Follow through, that's what.
Millions of people watched his commercials. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan helped make people more security conscious.
Mr. Kay told The New York Times that the M.T.A. was asking people to participate in each other's safety.
The six-word battle cry for civic engagement came from research in Israel, where being on the lookout for terrorism is routine.
In 2003 Mr. Kay said the assignment was a kind of loose-lips-sink-ships. It was ironic that in World War II the message was to keep your mouth shut. The message is in the trains.
There were many appeals that were rejected because they were too long or complicated.
The phrase "Be suspicious of things that look suspicious" was also thrown out. According to transit officials, the wording was all but guaranteed to generate crank calls since New Yorkers tend to regard one another and their possessions warily.
According to the transit agency's executive director, there are a lot of suspicious looking people.
One week before the American invasion of Iraq began, posters with the slogan "If you see something, say something" were put in the subway system.
Mr Kay told The Times in 2010 that he was proud of what it had done. Some things can't be stopped. If it is stoppable, then that is its reason for being.
John J. McCarthy, the M.T.A.'s chief of external relations, said in a statement after Mr. Kay's death that he wanted to serve as a counterbalance to "Snitches get stitches".
Mr. Kay was credited with kicking off the use of the Super Bowl as a global showcase for innovative and expensive advertisements. They created a spot for the Xerox high-speed duplicator.
Jack Eagle, a comedian and former big-band trumpeter, played Brother Dominic, who was shown toiling away in the basement of an abbey, writing a manuscript. When the father superior asked him for 500 copies, he found a friend with a Xerox copying machine and got the job done quickly.
His fellow monks think it's a miracle.
One of the top 50 campaigns of the 20th century was the Brother Dominic campaign.
By positioning Honda as the car that sells itself, Mr. Kay and his colleagues created a folk hero out of a mythical salesman. Danny would not be able to make his pitch before customers walked into the showroom.
Mr. Kay persuaded an upstart company called Eagle Telephonics to spend $10,000 to hire an engineer from the American Museum of Natural History to build a radio-controlled robotic eagle that alighted on a deskbound executive in a commercial.
The executive asked if he could notice anything unusual about his office. The ad ends with the phrase, "Now all other phones are extinct."
The goal of legal action was the focus of the campaign for the firm.
One commercial said to remember that guy. Who finished second in the New York Marathon? We don't, neither do we. It's all about winning.
The song "Hail to the Chief" opens a commercial that shows portraits of historical figures. A voice-over says that presidential elections are similar to lawsuits. Unless you win, you are no longer a person. They lost to Grant, Jefferson, Van Buren and Taylor.
Mr. Kay worked for the M.T.A. when he came up with the security alert. In 1993, he wrote a poster message to riders that started by parodying the vexing problem of inaudible loudspeaker announcements with a gap-laden message.
Mr. Kay and his partners pursued accounts aggressively. In 1982, they learned that WCBS-TV in New York was looking for a new agency, but by that time the station's director of communications, Joseph Passarella, had narrowed the search to three other agencies.
Mr. Kay and Ms. Korey used to be in New York. They told Mr. Passarella that they had his dog. If you would like to see him again, look at this reel. Mr. Passarella called his wife to make sure she didn't get a dog since he left home that morning, and he hired Korey Kay to handle the account.
Kay was born in the Bronx. Samuel was a comptroller at Grey advertising. His mother ran a Comptometer for a large firm.
After moving with his family to New Jersey from the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, Allen earned a degree in advertising from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles in 1967.
He joined Needham in 1971 after working for a number of different companies. He founded the advertising company with his wife.
He is survived by his wife, daughters, sister, and six Grandchildren.
The author, Mr. Kay, died before he finished his book. It was called "death runs in my family."
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